It would be awesome to have the possibility to configure cron jobs instead of just a spin down delay for discs in the ui. Unraid is a pretty energy saving os so I would prefer to further adjust spin ups / downs. I loved using the feature with my Synology and would be happy to have a similar thing in Unraid too ❤

I am not sure how it would work.

If the OS or an app needs data from a drive that it down, it will spin it up. What happens in a model where the up/down cycle is handle by a cronjob ? The app does not have the right to spin up the drives and complains that the files are not found ?

And what happen to the drives during a phase where the cron decides that it is ON time ? They cannot spin down ?

For me the way it works now offer the longest possible OFF time. But you need to setup your apps or other cronjobs so that they don't spin up the drives without a reason.

Thank you for the reply and your concerns.

What bothers me is that I would like to have my media drive (music, movies, ...) spun up at day and spun down at night. I do not want to wait until a disc is spun up when I access some music files or a tv show. I do not want to spin up the disc multiple times a day because the spin down delay is set to a minimum either. If the spin down delay is higher so that this does not happen at day, the drive will be active quite some time in the night. I hope I could describe this a little bit better now 😃

Idea: The cron job configures a must be active / spin up of discs time. Then the spin down delay does not work. After that time a disc spins down if no activity is registered. Now it behaves "as normal" and spins up again on activity and down after the delay. The next day or so the cron job is active again and the disc spins up.

Could you not set up a cron job that accesses a drive a frequent intervals during the day (thus keeping it spun up). This could be a script run by the User Scripts plugin. Maybe not perfect but would seem to meet the basic requirement.

I get that waiting can be bad in some circumstances.

For TV Shows or Movies, it's not that bad, since the individual playtime is long. For music though, I find it problematic too. But rather than keeping my drives UP, I moved my music library to a Pool using SSDs.

On 6/14/2025 at 10:27 AM, itimpi said:

Could you not set up a cron job that accesses a drive a frequent intervals during the day (thus keeping it spun up). This could be a script run by the User Scripts plugin. Maybe not perfect but would seem to meet the basic requirement.

This seems a little bit hacky. I know this workaround but I think there is also a need to have this possibility in the ui. This is why I want to discuss this topic in the forum.

On 6/14/2025 at 1:36 PM, ChatNoir said:

For TV Shows or Movies, it's not that bad, since the individual playtime is long. For music though, I find it problematic too. But rather than keeping my drives UP, I moved my music library to a Pool using SSDs.

I do this for my documents. I can think about music and photos, too. But I also don't want to spin up my drives multiple times a day watching a video. I think an uptime of 12h is more efficient than 3-4 spin-ups a day. At weekends I often watch a show in the morning, then during the day and maybe a movie in the afternoon. The spin-down delay is too static to reflect a weekday and weekend scenario. Maybe there is vacation time too. We need a flexible option here 🙏🏼